A silver halide photographic light-sensitive material is exposed to light and is then color developed, during which a dye is produced upon reaction of an oxidized aromatic primary amine color developing agent with a dye forming coupler, so that a color image is formed.
Generally in the above-mentioned process, a color subtraction process is used for color reproduction so as to form color images in yellow, magenta and cyan, respectively.
As for such cyan color image forming couplers, phenols or napthols have popularly been used so far.
There is, however, a serious color reproduction problem in cyan images each formed with such phenols and naphthols having so far been used. The very problem is that there is an unnecessary spectral absorption. Namely, an unwanted irregular spectral absorption will take place in a green spectral region, because the spectral absorption is not sharp on the short wavelength side of a spectral transmission curve. Because of this problem, in negative light-sensitive materials, such an unwanted irregular spectral absorption has to be compensated by a masking or the like countermeasures, and in the case of print paper, there is not any countermeasure at all and color reproducibility is substantially deteriorated. Such as the state of things.